I’m fascinated by this tidbit from an HBR article on energy management: “Without intermittent recovery, we’re not physiologically capable of sustaining highly positive emotions for long periods.”
If you’re working from home, you have a lot more options for intermittent recovery. I think this is why, despite the tedium or loneliness, so many of us want to keep working from home. We are more in charge of our moment-to-moment environment, and it can be really rejuvenating to get up and change the laundry, pet the dog, or get out art supplies for a few minutes. I do all of this and abide by the research-driven maxim that energy is depleted after 90-120 minutes when we are doing knowledge work. This is why 12-hour days behind a desk make zero sense and why I give many breaks when I’m facilitating groups.
But what can intermittent recovery look like if you are stuck behind a check stand, crisscrossing a manufacturing floor, or under the hood of a car? A few suggestions from HBR and yours truly:
Deep Breathing. We’ve all heard this a million times by now, but I find I still don’t practice it enough. The authors (Schwartz and McCarthy) say, “One simple but powerful ritual for defusing negative emotions is what we call ‘buying time.’ Deep abdominal breathing is one way to do that. Exhaling slowly for five or six seconds induces relaxation and recovery and turns off the fight-or-flight response.” I love to think of deep breathing as actually slowing down time, and this is something that truly none of us can say we don’t have time to do.
Expressing Appreciation to Others. This one is pretty counterintuitive. When I have LESS time and LESS energy, I’m supposed to spend it on others?! It’s amazing how efficient this is for boosting my mood or giving me a little more energy. It’s why I send a lot of snail mail and give away homemade granola, but it doesn’t have to be that drastic. It can be bringing a cup of ice water to a co-worker, sending a thank-you text, or asking a follow-up question. I feel less burned out and more in charge of my energy when I widen my lens.
Off the Phone and Into the World. I have been saddened lately looking around at the public spaces I am in. At the beach, airport, in line at the grocery store, couples on a date night, everyone absorbed in their little screens. My hairstylist makes fun of me because, while the dryer is on, I close my eyes and take a little meditative moment in my chair. She tells me that hardly anyone does that. They immediately reach for their phone. If I’m standing in line at the post office, I try to notice children or how good the clerks are at their jobs. This literally boosts my energy almost immediately—I see humanity in all its messiness and glory, and it’s far more fascinating than what’s going on with an acquaintance I’ve met once. Scrolling does not give us intermittent recovery. There are loads of data to suggest that it, in fact, does the opposite.
There are things to be wildly excited about in this life (sunsets, a perfect apricot, the birth of a child) and things to be wildly against (ecological disaster, racism and homophobia, criminalizing poor people). As long as we are burned out or numbing out, we will not spend our energy delighting in beauty or responding to injustice. The world needs us to be awake, and we can do this by managing all the small choices we make every day about where our energy goes, all of our “yes’s” and “no’s.” As always, I’d love to hear about anything that’s working for you.